Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “China,” said Jenay. “China, China, and China.”

  “Agreed, the question of China troubles us,” said Elaine. “Iran remains an issue. And Africa.”

  “Africa?” Lucan laughed derisively. “That’s not a problem. Taylor?”

  “We’d like to accelerate the imposition of an overtly Fascist government in the United States,” I said. “We need stricter immigration controls, surveillance policies. And we need those things now. The timetable that’s been established is, in our view, dangerously slow. They’ve got so many black agencies within their government, no one knows what the other is doing, and I’m not certain we know. We have to get a handle on that immediately,”

  “Skyler Means will take care of it,” he said. “I have complete confidence in him.”

  “Means and his people are stretched too thin,” I said. “We’re all stretched too thin. Cracks are starting to show, especially in the States.”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll discuss it. Is that all?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Isn’t that odd? I’m not hearing anything about a redefinition of our relationship with the animals.” Lucan built a church-and-steeple with his fingers. “We’ll begin with China. I believe it’s time to consider another thinning of the herd.”

  It was past eleven before we concluded our business. The waiters brought in the cheese cart; the manager put in an appearance, thanked us for our business, and then they withdrew. Vid and Daniele occupied one end of the table, carrying on a faltering conversation that, judging by what I heard, made sense only to them. At the other end, Lucan sat with the professor, prompting him in his ceaseless lecture, rewarding him now and again with a wedge of cheese. Their political differences set aside for the moment, Elaine and Jenay chatted and laughed by the door, while Giacinta had followed Liliana out onto the balcony. She had unbuttoned Liliana’s blouse and they were embracing.

  We had that night made significant decisions that would affect millions of lives, but I was more interested in Giacinta’s well-being, in repairing the damage Lucan had done, than I was with assessing my evening’s work, second-guessing the compromises I had made and weighing them out against what I had won. Goaded by Lucan’s tampering, encouraged by Jenay-and-Elaine’s validation of my choice, but mainly due to the thrust of my own peculiar tastes, I had developed an affection for Giacinta during the brief span of our relationship and I felt no small jealousy toward Liliana—though Giacinta’s attraction for her was a contrivance, a falsity, mine for Gia was equally false, equally contrived, and the only way I could deny this was to steer her away from Liliana and immerse both of us in an illusion I created. But manipulating a human mind is like entering a room filled with mist and fashioned of fragile crystal, and you must step carefully or else you will break everything. Restoring a mind is still more difficult—it was nothing I could accomplish without a degree of concentration difficult to achieve at Baldassaro’s. And so, deciding that repairs would have to wait until we were back at the Villa Ruggieri, I went to refill my wine glass, coming within earshot of Lucan and the professor.

  “One might reasonably conjecture,” Professor Rappenglueck was saying, staring at the cheese cart, “that the great turns in human history were accomplished by force of arms, by inventions that caused society to evolve, and so forth. Who could imagine…” His features twisted as he sought to complete the sentence.

  “Come on, Rappy.” Lucan waggled a wedge of gouda in front of the professor. “‘That for all intents and purposes…’”

  “Who could imagine,” the professor went on, “that for all intents and purposes our history ended in the mid-Paleolithic with the discovery by Cro-Magnon man that a variety of starthistle, when attacked by rhinocyllus conicus…”

  “‘…yielded a chemical,’” Lucan prompted.

  “…a chemical…” The professor licked his lips. “…that slowed the rate of…”

  Lucan clicked his tongue in annoyance and fed Rappenglueck the cheese.

  I pulled back a chair and sat, stretching out my legs. “Doesn’t your pet mouse know any other tricks?”

  “It’s a synaptic response,” Lucan said absently. “He senses the importance of these gatherings, and he tends to think he’s back in Geneva, giving the address he prepared for the IGY conference.”

  “The one you prevented him from giving,” I said. “By destroying him.”

  Lucan’s face hardened, yet he refused to rise to the bait. He cut another wedge from the wheel of gouda. The professor was still nibbling on the previous wedge, yellow crumbs in his beard; he chewed faster on seeing the fresh wedge.

  “A year ago,” said Lucan wistfully, “he could have recited entire paragraphs. Now he can barely get through a sentence. He’s falling apart.” He fed the professor the second wedge, stroked his hair, and spoke to him as though to a precious child. “But you were almost famous, weren’t you, Rappy? You might have been as famous as Newton or Leakey.”

  “Tell me. Do you still fuck him?” I asked, repulsed by Lucan’s display of intimacy.

  “You know, I think I’ll answer your question. One day the information may come in handy.” Lucan resettled in his chair. “At home, Rappy’s almost his old self some days. On those days, sometimes the illusion of wholeness suffices and we’re affectionate with one another. Is there anything more you’d care to know?”

  The professor made a complaining noise; he had finished his gouda.

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ve got the picture.”

  “You really are an astonishing fool!” Lucan hacked at the cheese. “For someone who became a clan leader in so short a time, you have the most appalling blindness. You can’t see yourself at all.”

  “And you can, I suppose?”

  “See you? Oh, yes. The fact is, I’ve always recognized your potential. One day you’ll be my successor, and I have the highest of hopes for your term. If a cure for your blindness is found, that is.” He tipped his head to the side. “Would it surprise you to learn that I espoused attitudes similar to yours when I was young? Regarding the animals, I mean.”

  “I’d be more surprised if you didn’t make that claim,” I said. “The elderly are prone to react that way when confronted with the logic of the future. ‘Ah, yes!’ they say. ‘Once I thought as you, but experience has cured me of such enthusiasms.’”

  Lucan fed another wedge to the professor. “Forget it.”

  “Wait! Aren’t you going to tell me? I’m dying to hear. Let me think. What would you say?” I sat beside Lucan, affecting the pose of someone in deep study. “When you were younger, you were afire with possibility. You had a vision of the world based upon trust, upon accords, not on the hard-won wisdom of your elders. The long centuries armored you against such foolishness, but in your dotage you took a lover from among the animals. You’d had many such lovers, but this one…he was special. A professor who had stumbled across the secret of our primacy, of our very existence. After you were forced to destroy him, you continued to love him. Of course, it wasn’t altogether love you felt. Part of your emotional commitment was a tribute to the youthful philosophies you once embraced. It may be you understood now that they were not so foolish, after all. But it was too late in life, your position was such that you couldn’t publicly espouse them. So in a sense, your love became an emblem that demonstrated you bore the gene of caring. The taint of the animals, our cousins, whom we detest and love…it’s a crutch we have to carry. We must proclaim it, wear it like a lapel pin in order to testify that, though we assault them with AIDS, with endless warfare, with pollutants to which we are immune, we love our deficient cousins. What a tragedy we’re forced to poison them like rats!” I leaned back, crossed my legs. “Perhaps one day even someone as blind as I may come to adopt this posture.”

  “One day,” said Lucan distantly. “Even you.”

  It was unlike him to be so docile—he had always been fierce in his arguments. He went back to grooming Rappenglueck, clea
ning the crumbs from his beard. In hopes, perhaps, of receiving more cheese, the professor said, “On the shoulder of the buffalo, if you’ll note the slide, there is a pattern of dots.”

  “It’s all right, Rappy,” Lucan said.

  The professor tried again. “Unlike similar patterns in the other paintings, this does not represent a constellation, but the starthistle. Its position relative to the Northern Crown, appearing directly over the bull’s shoulder, leads me…leads…”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “We haven’t discussed the project.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss.” Lucan wiped Rappenglueck’s lips. “No progress.”

  “We were told to expect a breakthrough.”

  “Do you really believe we’ll abandon them? That we’ll just slip off through some sidereal door and leave them to heaven?”

  I was shocked to notice that tears had collected in Lucan’s eyes…so shocked that I failed to respond.

  “There’ll be no breakthrough,” Lucan went on. “The science is there, but there’s no will for a breakthrough. If we inadvertently stumble upon one, we’ll only use it as a last resort.”

  “…leads me to suspect,” the professor said triumphantly, “that Cro-Magnon man associated the thistle in a most specific way with the stars of the Northern Crown.”

  Lucan patted his hand.

  “Am I to infer from what you say that the project staff is slacking?” I asked. “Because if that’s…”

  “Not at all. I’m saying we’re bound by the patterns of the past. We’re enslaved by our natures. Our hatred of the animals, our love for them…it’s the same emotion. That’s why our only recourse is extermination. We’re capable of killing something we love, but abandon it? Never.” Lucan made a show of cracking his knuckles. “Our ambivalence toward them has caused our current troubles. Over the millennia, it’s developed into a weakness. A terrible weakness. We need something to rouse us from our stupor.”

  “I’ve heard this song far too many times,” I said. “I’m sick of listening to it.”

  “Oh, I understand. Really, I do. You need a lesson to drive it home. I don’t know if I’m the one to teach you, but tonight I’ll teach you at least one small lesson. You’ll learn that mercy is more of an indulgence than a grace.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For one thing, your companion for the evening. Giacinta.” Lucan had completed the professor’s toilette and now he set about adjusting the knot of Rappenglueck’s tie. “I’m afraid I left her in a rather delicate condition. As it stands, she’ll likely live out her years in excellent mental health. But any further interference with her mind, if you attempt, let’s say, to sway her from her passion for Liliana…They’re so flimsy. She won’t be able to withstand another alteration. You’ll spend the rest of her life trying to restore her. Not the happiest of choices, as you can see.” He put a hand on the professor’s shoulder. “You could kill her. That would be the simplest course. I can tell you’re smitten and I know that makes things difficult. But it would spare you a lot of grief.”

  Furious, I wanted to strike him, and I would have done so had we been elsewhere, engaged in less public business. I made for the balcony, intending to ascertain the extent of the damage he had done to Gia.

  “Oh, Taylor!” he called.

  I looked back to where he sat plucking at Rappenglueck’s clothing.

  “My compliments on your choice of a companion.” Here Lucan offered a final florid gesture, one of such ornate, ironic precision, it seemed a summing up of the evening. “As eldest, it’s my pleasure to declare Giacinta the winner of our competition. She, more than anyone I’ve seen in recent years, embodies the frailty and strength of the human weed. You have my sincere congratulations.”

  I shooed Liliana away from the balcony, closed the French doors after her, and examined Giacinta. It was as Lucan had said. Having been altered, the stability of her mind, of that crystal, mist-filled room, had been compromised and any further alteration would cause the walls to crack, only a little at first, but the cracks would spread, leading inexorably to collapse; yet I found myself altering her even before I had decided to do so, obeying an impulse I was unable to resist. Steeped in her thoughts, discernable as might be glints and movements, the dartings of fish in a murky bowl, I could not abide the notion that her passion, the focused product of all that indistinct energy, be directed toward anyone aside from myself for an instant longer. When I pulled back from her, I felt drenched, dripping with her, droplets of pure need, her sweet yearnings, her sour greed, her sullen ambition, her tangy lust, her bloody hungers. Her face, tilted up toward me, was once again adoring, heartbreakingly plain. But absent was that accent of desperation. My restoration having been clumsier by necessity than Lucan’s alteration, I knew I would never again glimpse the original Gia.

  My good-byes were perfunctory and once out on the Via Poseidone, I hailed a taxi and had the driver convey us to the Villa Ruggieri. Giacinta giggled and clung to me as we rode the ancient elevator up to my suite, where, in an immense teak bed with sheets marbled by moonlight, dappled with shadow, beneath a high frescoed ceiling, and under the regard of pale torturers and poisoners and assorted monsters of the ruling class who glowered from decaying tapestries on the walls, their rich velvets and silks reduced to a brownish ferment by the centuries, I made love to her, wanting as much of her as I could gather before she began to decline. After she had fallen asleep, I put on a shirt and trousers, went into the sitting room and lay down upon a sofa. I thought briefly of the evening, of the business we had done, and then I thought of Gia and what I intended to do about her.

  She was irretrievably broken and thus unattainable, at least in her original form, the form that had initially attracted me, and I saw the trap into which I was about to walk, entering into a relationship that could be no more than a heterosexual copy of Lucan’s with Professor Rappenglueck. However, her unattainability was half her charm. Love in all its forms, I supposed—love between the animals, between us, love between the subspecies—followed a similar development, beginning with a flirtatious glance, a dash of pheromones, thereafter progressing to doting looks, then to sex, and at every step along the way a decision was involved: you decided to take the first step, to walk the next step farther; you contrived the illusion that this was it for you, this was the ultimate; and once past its peak moment, you decided whether you wanted to stick around for the tragedy, whether that suited your notion of love, whether you were going to attempt to create the illusion of unconditional love, to believe that there was more to love than your contrivance of it, that it was not your creation but a powerful universal force that swept us along. These little dramas in which we cast ourselves so as to inspire our lives, to give us reason to persevere…They would be amusing if not for the fact that, no matter how often our faith is proven unwarranted, we believe in them.

  The cynicism of these thoughts and their underlying naïvete should have been sufficient to persuade me to rid myself of Giacinta. They seemed proof of her negative effect upon me. Yet I continued to debate the matter. An enormous face, counterfeited by shadows and the visible portions of a fresco, stared down at me from the ceiling, and I was contemplating that face, thinking it superior in design to the sylvan scene actually depicted, when I heard a chthonic rumbling, followed by a tremor that shook the building for more than a minute, toppling a clock from the mantel, sending ashtrays scampering across tabletops, overturning a chair, bouncing me onto the floor. I staggered up, knowing at once what had happened, having a clear perception of it, though I tried to persuade myself that I must be wrong, and hurried into the bedroom. Gia was still on the bed, poised on all-fours, her eyes wide with fright. I convinced her to lie back, gentled her, and told her she would be all right if she stayed in the suite, but that I had to go.

  “Please!” She put her arms about my neck. “You take me.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Wait here. Two hours. I’ll come back in two
hours. I promise.”

  My cell phone rang. Elaine. I switched it on and said, “Yes, I know.”

  “I can’t believe the son-of-a-bitch…”

  “Have you called Rome?”

  “No, I thought you…”

  “Call Rome. Now. Tell them to send helicopters. We have some in Palermo. Seal off the area. You coordinate from the hotel. Have you heard from Jenay?”

  “No. Shouldn’t you coordinate?”

  “That’s your job now.”

  Following a silence, she said tremulously, “I guess it is.”

  “Find out which satellites are passing over southern Italy and blind them. Knock them down if you have to.”

  “God, what a mess!”

  “Call Rome. I’ll get back to you.”

  Gia renewed her pleading after I switched off, but once again I rebuffed her.

  “Stay. Here you be secure,” I told her in fractured Italian. “Due oras. Okay?”

  She put on a sad face, but she drew the blankets up to her neck. “Okay.”

  I kissed her and backed from the room, reassuring her with a smile. Then, not trusting the elevator, I raced down the stairs, ignoring the hotel guests and staff that I encountered, and descended the hill into the ruins of Diamante.

  There was a tremendous amount of dust in the air. It coated my tongue, the membranes of my nostrils, got into my eyes. In the upper reaches of the town, the buildings were some of them intact, others partially demolished, yet I saw no one on the streets and I assumed Lucan’s release must have killed everyone in an instant. His mental signature, which had been palpable at the hotel, boiled like steam from the wreckage, overwhelming all other sensory impressions. My cell phone rang. It was Elaine again. She told me the helicopters were on their way, the satellites had been dealt with, and our operatives within the Italian government were busy attempting to defuse the situation. As I listened, I began to feel the weight of my new responsibilities.

  “Where are you?” she asked and, when I told her, she said, “I’m on top of the hotel. Wait until you see the waterfront. We’re going to play hell cleaning it up.”